Name: Kristy Fercho
Title: President of Mortgage
Company: Flagstar Bank
Number of Employees She Manages: 1,800
Mortgage Exec Since: 2001
Who Inspires Her: Her father, Willy Williams. In 1969, in the aftermath of the 1968 Mexico Olympics, a tumultuous era for Civil Rights, Dick Clausen, a forward-thinking athletic director at the University of Arizona, selected Williams, as head track coach. It was history in the making because he was the first African American head coach at a major university in the U.S.
On Entering the Mortgage Biz
On Sept. 11, 2001, Fercho was in New York City working in the human relations department of PepsiCo. That horrific experience led her to reconsider her life style, to find more balance between her workaholic, business focus and giving more back to society.
Fercho decided to consider making a career change.
And remembered, something she’d heard a Fannie Mae executive say at a conference she’d attended, “At our company, the mission of funding the American dream was as important as the job.”
That comment intrigued Fercho.
So, she began to identify companies she might like to work for, companies where the mission was as important as the job and compiled a short list of possibilities that included Walt Disney, The American National Red Cross, and of course, Fannie Mae.
Thirty days later, Oct. 11, she was hired to work in the human-resources department for multi-family at Fannie Mae.
Once at Fannie Mae, Fercho’s approach to her job was to become expert at her job and to understood what everyone else did as well. She worked to understand the mortgage business, reading everything she could get her hands on, often into the early morning hours.
As a result, she could make strategy and performance suggestions to executives in meeting--who she found were open to her advice and often implemented her suggestions. She became known within Fannie as someone that understood the business well, knew what would work or wouldn’t work--and was imbued with leadership qualities.
In 2005, Fannie Mae was forced to restate earnings, due to improprieties, which a regulator attributed to the corporate culture of the company. The culture had to be evaluated and changed, and Dan Mudd, the former CEO of the company, asked Fercho to look into it and make recommendations for improving the culture.
She would go on to hold other high-profile positions, including serving as senior vice president for customer delivery, responsible for the strategy and performance of single-family customers in the West, with an acquisition volume of over $300 billion, before joining Flagstar.
Leadership Keys Are Humility, Empathy
Fercho articulated some keys to strong, effective leadership. One key is humility, but more than that it’s a respect for the expertise and insights of her team. In her view, a leader has to put her team in a position to shine and to contribute. A leader can’t know everything, so she makes sure employees have a voice, are given an opportunity to be heard, and better-informed decisions can be made. To that end, Fercho has no problem saying, “I don’t know this that well” and ask the team for help. Or she’ll explain her thinking on a topic and ask them “to step up and challenge my assumptions.”
Second, leadership requires empathy. Place yourself in shoes of employees and consumers. Challenge how you fit and bring in solutions that solve real problems and meet the needs of consumers. To know if the approach is working informally ask questions of borrowers, or take a formal survey.
And then listen to their responses.
Leadership requires creating vision and then teaching people to use their talents, skills and abilities. Leadership is not about you, but about others; always make it about other people. Let people use their talent and abilities to work to an end. You get a better outcome that way. It’s about potential. In contrast, management is more about the specifics of a task at hand.
